4 JANUARY 2017

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The Fawcett Society welcomes the Resolution Foundation Intergenerational Commission’s article, published Wednesday 4 January, on the generational gender pay gap.

Commenting on the article, ‘Is the gender pay gap on the brink of closure for young women today?’ Fawcett Society CEO, Sam Smethers said:

“The gender pay gap grows over women’s working lives, particularly impacted by the point when women have children. But it is misleading to think we’ve cracked it for young women.

The proportion of women in the workforce who are graduate educated overtook men in the mid-90s, so if anything the pay gap should be much smaller. Millennial women overall are earning more relative to men than previous cohorts of younger women because more of them are graduates. But the gap soon opens up. Institute for Fiscal Studies research shows very limited progress in the gender pay gap amongst graduates over the last 20 years. After 10 years there is a graduate gender pay gap of 23%.

The reality is we have the best educated female labour force we have ever had. But their potential is being wasted and it isn’t translating into pay equality. That is a cost to them, to employers and to the economy.”

To find out more, read Sam’s blog for the Huffington Post, ‘The gender pay gap does not age well‘, where she shares her thoughts on the Resolution Foundation’s new analysis.

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Fawcett's campaigning led to new gender pay gap reporting legislation, which requires organisations with over 250 employees to publish data on their gender pay gaps, including bonuses, by April 2018. 

READ MORE ABOUT OUR WORK ON CLOSING THE GENDER PAY GAP HERE.